


Guys Like You & Me (March Off To Hell)

by shewho



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: "I can't ask you out or we both could die", Brokeback Mountain References, Episode: s05e24-25 Grave Danger, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Homophobic Violence, M/M, OH and also:, Post: Grave Danger, Pre-Relationship, What a happy little fic for national coming out day, exacerbated by the knowledge that public displays of affection might endanger your life, intimacy issues, lite ptsd, what's holding you back? internalized homophobia! and also a very real fear of death!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 00:10:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20985575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: “Nice to know you, Ennis del Mar,”says the dark-haired man who looks vaguely Greg-like if Nick squints his eyes and tilts his head at a certain angle. They’ve got the same plush mouth, same unruly eyebrows. Same constellation of dark freckles.It scares him shitless.





	Guys Like You & Me (March Off To Hell)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers I guess for Brokeback Mountain (2005), from which the title comes. Strong warnings for homophobic language/slurs and descriptions of homophobic violence resulting in severe injury/death (varying degrees of graphic). Seriously, y'all; mind the tags.

He’d seen the previews months ago when he and Warrick had gone to see a matinee showing of _Wedding Crashers _after work one day_. “I don’t think we’ll be adding that one to our must-watch list,”_ Warrick had muttered, reaching across to steal another handful of popcorn from the tub, and Nick had murmured back, _“No, I reckon we won’t,”_ because that was what Warrick was expecting to hear.

So he doesn’t go during the opening weekend, and he doesn’t dare go to any of his usual theaters. Nick waits two weeks and then drives the forty-six minutes to Moapa on his day off, where he buys a ticket for the new _King Kong_ movie and a diet cola because his mouth feels like he’s spent the entire afternoon swallowing sand.

He sits in his carefully-chosen aisle seat for half an hour, then sneaks down the hall into the theater that’s just starting to seat for the 8:50 showing of _Brokeback Mountain_.

He watches two men shake hands and he wonders if everything stands still for them like it does for him, sometimes, dialed down to that single point of contact between Greg’s hand and his as they exchange papers or fistbumps or the occasional touch at a crime scene, separated by layers of latex.

_“Nice to know you, Ennis del Mar,”_ says the dark-haired man who looks vaguely Greg-like if Nick squints his eyes and tilts his head at a certain angle. They’ve got the same plush mouth, same unruly eyebrows. Same constellation of dark freckles.

And that’s that. For the moment, anyway.

And for Nick, the anxiety just ratchets one notch higher. It’s a sick, creeping feeling in the pit of his stomach. Rural Wyoming in the sixties? Rural anywhere, anytime? No way this ends well. No way, no day.

Oh, he wants to be wrong. He’s pretty sure he’s never wanted to be wrong about something so much in his entire life.

But he’s not wrong.

He spends half the film with his fist pressed between his teeth to stop any errant sound from escaping, feels his heart dart from his stomach to his throat when he sees the big red _DECEASED _stamp on the back of that postcard.

Blood thunders in Nick’s ears as the dialogue fades to a tinny whine and he watches three men break open Gyllenhaal’s face with a tire iron. He wants to bolt from the theater – _he needs to leave, right the fuck now_ – but he bites his lip until he tastes metal and waits it out instead.

No way he can sit through this movie again. No way in fuckin’ hell.

It’s hard to breathe. He’s painfully aware of the air in his lungs. It reminds him of being seven, and swinging high and then higher until the chains on the swing set jangled and bucked, and jumping at the wrong moment and landing flat on his back, unable to suck air.

It reminds him of that cold panic closing in as his father knelt over him saying, “_Just breathe easy, Pancho. Your body remembers how.”_

He isn’t sure that that’s true anymore.

When the lights come up, Nick leaves the theater on autopilot.

The air outside the building is just as oppressive and stifling as the air inside, but Nick still feels like he can breathe easier, even if he’s too-aware of every breath, unconsciously counting them, latching onto each inhale. He’s wobbly all over, sticky and hot despite the post-sundown drop in temperature, and his mouth is dry.

_God_, he needs a drink.

His eyes keep tracking back to the Christmas lights looped across the marquee, the smiling couples holding onto each other by the fingertips, the happy families bundling kids into scarves and parkas even though it hasn’t hit freezing yet. He feels like a moth beating itself to death watching happy people from behind a pane of glass; like he’s glimpsing the inner sanctum of some cult of happiness that he’s never going to have. The crowd noise seems muted as he finds his way back to the truck in a daze, feeling shaky and sore and raw.

(It takes three tries to get his key in the lock.)

He doesn’t start to scream until he’s a few miles down the road, but once he starts, it’s difficult to stop.

He screams until his throat is raw and even then he keeps on screaming, windows down, the highway ripping the sound away as soon as it leaves his lips. He isn’t even sure who he’s still screaming for: himself, those characters, Greggo, or a thousand faceless men.

Eventually, he gets enough of a grip to shut his mouth. _He’s fine_. He’s freaking out for no reason and he should just fucking _knock it off_. Because he’s fine. He’s _fine_.

Oh, he’s fine. Except that his brain is racing ahead at a million miles a minute, way too fast for him to properly process, just a tangle of disjointed thoughts and flash-memories.

He thinks of a dozen Decembers back in Dallas, of sitting in the backseat of his mother’s station wagon with the radio playing carols on a loop, his brothers cackling riotously whenever the line _“don we now our gay apparel”_ was sung.

He thinks of junior high, high school, every locker room he’s ever been in before coming to Vegas. Thinks of the echoed shouts of teenage boys: _cocksucker :: pussy :: motherfucker :: faggot :: faggot :: faggot :: faggot_.

Thinks of the morning his father’s mouth tightened into a knife-edge line as he folded the paper and tucked it under his plate, but not before Nick caught sight of the headline: _FATAL FAG-DRAG IN FRANKLIN COUNTY_.

Thinks of making out in the back stairwells of parties, in the beds of pickup trucks, in the flickering light of bonfires, underneath the latticed shadows of fire escapes. Thinks of worn-soft denim and muscled thighs under his hands. Thinks of the boy his junior year who looked at him with pity that Nick wouldn’t understand for years, and said _“I don’t fuck closet cases”_ like he’d said it a dozen times before.

Thinks of his parents’ faces when they’d come to see him in the hospital after he’d been buried alive and left for dead, the initial relief and familiar banter fading into strained smiles and confused glances shared over his head. Thinks of his mother looking at him oddly through the drug-induced haze and murmuring,_ “You’re not the boy you used to be,”_ and groggily thinking that of course he isn’t, who the hell _could _be? Well, message fucking received, Mama.

He thinks of Greg, who’s enviably shameless, who seriously does not give a shit what people think about what he eats or how he wears his hair or who he fucks.

This, he thinks, would be the part of the movie where he drives to Greg’s condo and rings his doorbell half a dozen times and tells the truth when Greg opens the door and fixes him with that beautifully perplexed expression that he only gets when he’s genuinely surprised. This would be the build-up to climatic confessions and brave words spoken at normal volume in the light of Greg’s porch lamp, if they lived in a sitcom.

(If only they lived in a sitcom.)

He feels a giggle building crazily in his throat, hears himself laughing wetly. Nick shivers, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the freeway air whipping through his open windows or because he’s finally, finally lost it. The windows whir as he rolls them up and tries to remember how to breathe enclosed by all that glass. For a moment, he wonders idly what would happen if he just let himself laugh like that, let his chest heave with hysterical hiccups until he throws up from it, maybe suffocates on his own vomit.

_No._

Nick’s stomach bottoms out as the thought registers. His throat tightens so quick that it’s hard to believe he’s really still breathing, and he feels… disoriented. Gutted. Like someone’s sliced him open from groin to sternum and poked around, scooped out his insides and put them back all wrong.

He wants to take it back – snatch the words right back out of the ether, shove them back into the sub-basement crawlspace of his brain where they belong – like if he can just _take it back_ it’ll make it like he never even had that thought in the first place.

His skin feels foreign and way too warm, too small to fit every warped part of him inside. That’s not what he wants. It’s really, really not. 

With a jolt, he realizes that he’s not just a little nauseous. The roiling in his gut and the roaring sound in his ears inform him that he’s seriously about to be sick.

Nick jerks his truck over onto the shoulder and clicks on his flashers, scrabbling for the door latch. Barely-harnessed _fear-anger-shame_ thrums through him and his whole body vibrates like a high-tension wire, usually steady hands shaking so badly that Nick can barely get his seatbelt undone before he’s vaulting from the truck’s high cab and vomiting into the dirt.

He spits twice, then leans his forehead against the window, hoping that the glass will cool his feverishly racing brain.

(It doesn’t work.)

Still breathing hard like he’s just done a sprint-mile, he stares at his reflection in the glass, eyes feeling gritty and sore. How is this, after _everything _that’s happened, how is this the thing that’s undone him?

_It wasn’t real,_ he reasons desperately_. It wasn’t even **real.**_

_That’s not true, though_, his traitorous brain argues_. It was **too **real._

Well. That’s a dangerous thought, but it just kind of is what it is.

Nick wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket, then peels off the offending garment and throws it onto the floor of the backseat. He slams the door, cracks the windows an inch, and merges back onto the nigh-empty stretch of road.

It’s stupid to leave the windows down but ever since the box, he _hates_ driving with them all the way up. Every once in a while, he’ll catch the reflective glare of a stoplight turning green in his peripherals or in the rearview, and his spine will stiffen in reflexive fear. The cold air blowing constantly in his face reminds him that there’s plenty more where that frigid breeze came from, never you mind. And besides, Nick never feels properly warm these days. Hasn’t for fuckin’ _months_ now.

It’s just another thing that he’s sorta getting used to.

With a dull start, Nick realizes that he’s not even _upset_ anymore, just deeply, deeply exhausted. Heart beating low in his stomach and bare arms prickling with numb goosebumps, he gulps down air so cold it _burns_ until he feels like his lungs are fully functional again, then lead-foots it all the way to his front door.

********

“Hey,” Greg leans through the break room’s open doorway, rapping his knuckles against the frame. “You wanna take off, grab a slushie?”

For a second, Nick’s brain can’t process the question, too caught up in imaging Greg’s bloodied face grinding against pavement, the back of his skull turned to porcelain dust amidst a mess of brain matter and bone shards and blood – _fuck_, a _crazy_ amount of blood – and maggots, third instar larvae all over that pretty face. The image, juxtaposed against Greg standing in the doorway perfectly healthy and whole, kicks the air out Nick’s lungs and makes him wanna retch. Static fills the space between his ears and for a single long second _he can’t fucking breathe. _

Nick shudders and forcibly turns that part of his brain off. _Don’t think about it._ “Slushies? Did you forget that it’s December, G? And also, like, nine A.M.?”

Greg shrugs, tilting his head and shooting Nick his best Please-Pretty-Please-I-Promise-I’ll-Make-It-Worth-Your-While grin. “So if it was nine _P.M.,_ would you partake in the slush?”

_“No,”_ Nick insists. “But the hour is not the bigger issue here.”

“C’mon, get your stuff,” Greg cajoles, already turning away, trusting that Nick will follow. (Given their shared track record, it’s a fair assumption.) “I’m buyin’.”

“Oooh,” he teases. “Big spender. What’s that gonna put you back; like, six bucks? ‘Sides, that shit’ll turn your insides blue. _Permanently_, if your shitty luck holds.”

Greg pouts impressively, arms crossed tight over his coat. “First of all, that’s an urban myth and you know it. Secondly, I’m gonna be a beautiful corpse no matter what,” he retorts with the kind of smug certainty that make Nick’s heart stutter in his chest. “Third, you are like, pretty much the unluckiest living person I’ve ever _met,_ which in this line of work is seriously saying something. And fourth, the occasional slushie every now and then isn’t gonna kill ya.”

“Oh, like a salad would kill _you_,” Nick mutters, threading his arms into the sleeves of his jacket as he stands and follows Greg out the door.

“No way,” Greg laughs, scarf trailing behind him like a flag as he does a few idle spins down the corridor, waiting for Nick to catch up. “I’m way too vain to die until I’m good and ready.”

_God_, he hopes that’s true.

“If we’re goin’, let’s go,” Nick rolls his eyes, gesturing broadly towards the glow of the exit signs. “Lead on.”

“Huzzah!” Greg shouts, throwing his fist into the air right in the middle of the hallway ‘cause he’s a fucking enormous dork. Nick has no idea why he’s so fond of this man. Clearly he was dropped on his head as an infant and the lasting repercussions are effecting his judgement.

But then Greg fixes him with that sunbeam smile that nobody, not even Nick – even on his absolute worst days – is immune to, and so he grins back.

Nick lowers his sunglasses onto his face as they step out of the lab and into the daylight in lockstep. So maybe everything’s a little fucked, but it’s a Tuesday morning, the sun is shining, and he’s on his way to get a potentially-free slushie at a god-forsaken hour with a cute guy whom he really, really likes (to his own hopeless detriment).

Things could be a lot worse. (For now, he isn’t willing to risk it.)

For now, this’ll have to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](https://panchostokes.tumblr.com/post/187586203642/sometimes-i-remember-that-brokeback-mountain-came) and mostly by my visceral horror watching the opening scene of “IT: Chapter II”. Idk, y’all; I am just dead on exhausted seeing cinematic queers die to “further the plot”. 


End file.
